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A country that is great does not burn food destined to starving people. It does not allow a president to unilaterally undo spending decisions made by Congress even as that Congress works on new budgets, that could also be disregarded. Its Supreme Court would not greenlight troubling presidential actions like shutting departments created and funded by Congress and the firing of thousands of federal employees without cause.
In a country that is great, the Department of Justice would not be demanding that states give it access to voter information and election systems, while the president and Republican Party continue to spread claims of voter fraud and stolen elections despite numerous investigations and court cases debunking such claims.
These recent events, pulled from recent headlines, would sure seem to indicate that the United States, once a beacon of freedom and democracy, has lost its way under President Donald Trump, the Republican-controlled Congress and a Supreme Court dominated by conservative judges, three of them appointed by Trump.
Start with the burning of food. When the Trump administration ordered the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development — an agency that has helped save lives and spread democratic ideals around the world for a relatively small amount of U.S. money — millions of tons of food destined to places around the globe where people are literally starving was caught in limbo.
Rather than do the humane — and dare we say, Christian — thing and help the food reach needy recipients, the U.S. government has ordered the destruction of 500 metric tons of food destined for Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s enough food to feed 1.5 million children for a week, The Atlantic reported. The emergency food, in the form of high-energy biscuits, was ordered by the Biden administration and had been stored in Dubai.
Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the House Appropriations Committee that the food would be distributed, a memo was instead sent to incinerate it, The Atlantic reported.
It will cost U.S. taxpayers $130,000 to destroy the biscuits.
This is not only asinine, it is cruel. The Trump administration is wasting money rather than helping starving children, apparently to make a political point.
While already paid-for food aid is destroyed, Republican members of Congress this week gave the Trump administration permission to essentially unilaterally veto spending decisions that were made by Congress long ago, including cancelation of funding for public broadcasting, which will harm local emergency alert systems.
Sen. Susan Collins voted against the measure. She slammed the secrecy around the $9 billion in retroactive cuts sought by the Trump administration.
“The rescissions package has a big problem — nobody really knows what program reductions are in it,” she said in a statement. “That isn’t because we haven’t had time to review the bill. Instead, the problem is that [Office of Management and Budget] has never provided the details that would normally be part of this process.”
If the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee can’t find out what’s in the bill, it clearly shouldn’t be moving forward. Yet, it did. And congressionally approved programs and funding will end to suit Trump’s demands.
Weirdly, this rescission package — and a package of tax cuts, spending cuts and big spending increases on immigration enforcement and detentions that was passed earlier this month (also with Collins’ no vote) — was approved as lawmakers in the House and Senate are going through the motions of marking up budgets for the many federal agencies for the next year. Will those budgets also be disregarded by Trump? Will more Republican lawmakers care?
This week, the Supreme Court’s majority, without explanation, gave the administration permission to move forward with shuttering the U.S. Department of Education, an agency created and funded by Congress. Last week, a ruling from the court allowed the administration to resume the firings of federal workers as part of an amorphous plan to shrink government.
“When the executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion in the Education Department case.
“The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave,” she added.
With seemingly no checks on this president’s power, it is especially concerning that the Trump administration has now turned its attention to elections. The Department of Justice has asked several states for access to their voting rolls and to election systems. Not only is this a violation of provisions of the Constitution that empower states to oversee elections, it is especially troubling given Trump’s ongoing claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, despite there being no evidence that this is true.
Maine has not received a formal information request, but the Secretary of State’s Office did receive an email from the DOJ criminal division seeking to explore an “information-sharing agreement” related to election fraud. This follows claims of voter fraud from the Maine GOP, which were debunked by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.
It also follows an executive order from Trump that would restrict mail-in ballots and require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Courts have put some parts of the order on hold.
A White House that deliberately makes people suffer, that bullies and steamrolls Congress — no matter what the law and Constitution says — and a Supreme Court that enables such actions are sure signs that America has lost its way. We have lost our bearings as a country built on the ideals of freedom and equality and become a country beholden to the whims and power of one man, even if it means burning food destined for starving people.
